FOIA

In Hillary's latest email scandal, newly released emails, many of which were not disclosed to the FBI, show that requests for "favors" from the Clinton Foundation started to roll in just 3 months after Hillary was confirmed as Secretary of State.

Fridays in the summer are a great day to dump news you don’t want scrutinized, as reporters will tell you. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel just dropped some propaganda, bragging about balancing the Chicago budget and fixing the city’s pension plans. While Reuters' Dave McKinney took the lies hook, line, and sinker; the facts behind the lies can be summarized thus: "the kicked can is not included."

President Obama's "most transparent administration ever" is being accused of "failure by design" in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must "make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format," but as The Guardian reports, a new lawsuit alleges DoJ intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.

“The new Hillary Clinton email records show she had zero interest in disclosing her emails to the public as the law requires,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “And the emails show the Obama State Department gave special accommodations to Clinton’s email system, which the agency knew was unsecure, was likely hacked, and was not transparent under FOIA.”

Though Obama launched his presidency with a promise to be the “most transparent” in history, his administration has had a fitful record on openness. Despite adding dozens of staffers to its FOIA offices, the State Department argued in court that it would take 75 years to complete a review of documents related to the Republican National Committee’s sweeping request of records for former Clinton aides.

Update: Donald Trump's campaign demands release of Hillary's TPP emails... With Hillary Clinton unclear on her 'real' support for ObamaTrade, and international trade bound to be a crucial issue during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, it will likely come as no surprise to many that, as International Business Times reports, the Obama administration has now abruptly blocked the release of Clinton's State Department correspondence about the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after first saying it expected to produce the emails this spring.

For decades, the story of Saudi Arabia recycling US petrodollars, i.e., funding the US deficit by buying US Treasuries with proceeds of its crude oil sales (mostly to the US), while the US sweetened the deal by providing the Saudis with military equipment and supplies, remained entirely in the conspiracy realm, with no confirmation or statement from the US Treasury department. Now, that particular "theory" becomes the latest fact, thanks to a fascinating story by Bloomberg which lays out the history of how the petrodollar was born...

Late Thursday evening the Justice Department, under US attorney general Loretta Lynch, first appointed in 1999 by none other than Bill Clinton, filed a court motion opposing the Clinton deposition request from conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch, claiming that the organization was trying to dramatically expand the scope of the lawsuit.

According to Lewis Lukens, a veteran 27-year foreign service officer at the State Department who served as the deputy executive secretary Clinton did not use a password to protect her stand-alone computer from unwanted intruders such as hackers. During the deposition, Lukens volunteered that the stand-alone computer adjacent to her suite did not have a password for protection “She wouldn’t have had a password.” Bekesha asked, astonished, “So the computer would have just been open and be able to use without going through any security features?” “Correct,” Lukens replied.